Brazen Mistakes (Brazen Boys #3)

54. Clara

Chapter 54

Clara

T he nightmare hits at the same time the sun inches over the horizon, and unlike last time, I know I’m not falling back asleep. I’ve slept enough in the last twenty-four hours, even if it was at weird times, that it’d be pointless to try. And maybe waking up at the crack of dawn will magically fix my current sleep issues.

Ha.

Crawling out from under RJ’s arm, I throw on one of his t-shirts and some of his joggers, tightening the drawstring until I don’t think I’ll lose them.

I’m not putting on the bra and jeans that I wore for our date last night when I haven’t even had any coffee yet. And coffee sounds almost good, so I’m curious to try a different flavor.

Stumbling down the stairs, I start the pot, hopping onto the counter while I wait, channeling a little of my inner Jansen in the move. And with a burst of clarity, I harness the bravery I found yesterday in sharing my past.

It’s time to deal with my future.

Opening my email, I click on the message from the FBI.

I know it’s not what I want. Not anymore. And holding the door open is just torturing me, locking me in limbo.

The FBI internship is an amazing opportunity. It’s the start of a whole future where I fight crime, where I change the world one case at a time.

But I’m changing the world here, too. RJ’s already taking down the men who hurt women like I was, girls and boys broken by circumstance, by parents, friends, or strangers who see them as not worth respect. Not worth privacy or autonomy.

And with the CI program, I’ll be right beside him, hunting those who hurt others, without the barrier of laws that protect only some people, while abandoning others.

If RJ’s dad actually seeks help, it might not change much of the world at large, but it will change RJ’s world, the lives of his sisters and mom.

Even smaller is the fact that Walker’s started sharing, opening his heart and showing me the wounds that he hides. So has Trips, the impossibility of his circumstance obvious.

And with Jansen teaching me to let go of the rules that have always bound me, the freedom heady and welcome after a lifetime of seeking perfection, first for my mom, and later for Bryce, it’s clear.

I don’t belong at the FBI.

My reply is short, a simple thank you followed by me declining the offer .

And when I hit send, a weight lifts from my shoulders.

That’s not the path for me. Not anymore.

Pulling down a mug, I listen to the pot’s final sputters as cursing sounds from the front hallway.

I skip to the front where Trips is struggling to carry a toolbox, a five-gallon bucket, and a freaking ladder up from the basement, banging into the doorframe as he goes.

“Need some help?” I ask.

He stops, a glare only partially meant for me on his face. “No.”

“Are you sure? If you had at least one hand free, the ladder wouldn’t be swinging around like the tail of a drunk dragon.”

His nostrils flare, and with a long enough pause to know I’ve bruised his delicate ego, he bobs his head to the toolbox. Once I have it, I back up, giving him space to navigate the doorway with the bucket and ladder, my grin sticking to my face. He pushes through to the back hallway, leaving me to trail him until he goes outside.

Nope. Not into the snow with bare feet. Been there, regretted that.

Instead, I keep the toolbox hostage, going to the kitchen to fix myself my coffee—lavender today—and then return, sipping my drink while Trips loads up the SUV. When comes for the box, I tuck it behind my back.

“Crash, I don’t have time for this.”

“Are you going out by yourself, Grumpy?”

He glares. Again. This time all for me. “I’m going to work.”

“Alone.”

“I don’t see anyone else, do you? Give me the box.”

“No. ”

I don’t know that either of us expected me to say that, and we both take a moment to recover.

I get there first. “Bryce is escalating. We decided to go two by two, and the last time I checked, Trips, you’re someone and you don’t have a buddy. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I can take your pussy-ass ex-boyfriend.”

“I’m sure you can in a fair fight. But that’s not the way he’s going to play this. He’s not going to come up to you and challenge you to a duel, Trips, with rules and the opportunity to look him in the face while you destroy him. He’s going to come after you sideways, in a way you’ll never expect, and then when he’s done his worst, he’ll send me a photo of the fallout. Which means, Mr. Westerhouse, you’re not going anywhere without a buddy.”

A sound that is suspiciously growl-like rumbles in his throat before he picks me up by the waist, walking me back into the house and slamming the door with both of us inside. A smattering of coffee trails down the back of my hand, but it’s worth it to have his hands on me, even for a moment. “Then you’d better be up for manual labor, Crash.”

I tilt my head to look up at him, standing so close that if I breathed deeply, my chest would touch his.

And I want to touch him. So badly.

Instead, I squeeze the handle of the toolbox behind my back, the case getting heavy the longer I hold it. “Can I bring music? Do I have time to change? I don’t want to ruin RJ’s clothes. And do I have time to throw a load of laundry in the wash?”

Trips rolls his eyes. “You have fifteen minutes. And I already packed speakers. ”

Flashing him a grin that makes his features freeze like a lake mid-winter, I hand him the toolbox. “Got it.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, I’m wearing some crummy clothes that were almost dead before I got them at the thrift store and wore them for two years, my dirty sheets and some of my clothes are whirring in the washer, and I have a travel mug for my coffee and a granola bar. I’m not hungry yet, but today feels like a new beginning.

And there’s no way I can handle another day like yesterday.

Trips leads me to the SUV, a coffee in his hands as well, shooting me suspicious looks as we trudge through the snow.

Once we’re in the truck, the engine slowly warming the cab as we take a few turns, I break. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You haven’t asked where we’re going and what we’re doing.”

“Just because you haven’t told me about your student-housing money laundering scheme doesn’t mean that no one did.”

He grips the steering wheel. “Which fucker told you?”

“Why didn’t you?”

He huffs out a breath. Only one turn later, we park in front of one of the houses I saw for sale on my run over Christmas. He clicks the car off, then rests one of his big hands on my knee. “Clara, I’ve already shared more with you than I’ve ever shared with anyone. Could we just not fight about this? It didn’t seem important, not with everything else you’ve got going on.”

The humility is as shocking as it is unexpected. I nod. “Yeah. I can do that. ”

Acceptance gained, he’s out of the truck, carrying the toolbox and bucket up the front porch, unlocking it as I follow with my purse and coffee.

“Turn the temp up to seventy. The thermostat is through there.” He points, then goes back outside to finish unloading.

Once the temperature is dealt with, I do a lap of the main floor, then head up the stairs, skipping a riser that screams when I try to put weight on it.

Upstairs, I find the same disgusting, broken mess I found downstairs. And I don’t even want to investigate the basement.

Back downstairs, Trips is taking off his coat, despite the house still being only warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I want to stand on the stairs and watch him, like I’m a girl who has a right to him. Only, I’m not his girlfriend. And my presence hasn’t made things easier for him.

I’m still learning all the ways I’ve fucked up his plans.

Reminding myself that he told me I’m helping, that my being on the team is making them money even when I feel like everything I’m doing is costing them, I clear my throat, staying a few steps up, not ready to feel small in front of him. Not yet. Not today.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” I joke, and he shakes his head.

“Even shitholes like this cost more than I’d like. I had to take a mortgage out on this one, because we didn’t have enough clean money for two outright buys within a month. So now I have to worry about interest and payments until I can get more cash cleaned through the other one.”

“What about our house? ”

“I bought it outright with my trust fund. But I ‘collect rent’ from all the guys, and now you, so we can clear a few thousand every month without raising any brows. But that’s peanuts compared to what we’re bringing in.”

“Hence, scaling up?”

“Yup. For now, I can only hire workmen who’ll take payment in cash. Maybe someday I can get a construction company up and running, which would be a double benefit—workmen and laundering—but that’s the future. Luckily, I like doing some of this shit. It feels good to take a horror show and turn it into a home for somebody. We’ll start with cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms so I can get a plumber in here.” He carries the ladder to the back, and I follow, setting up in the dismal space.

I put on a dance-able playlist, still light after sending that email, and settle into turning the kitchen into something that isn’t a health hazard, working side by side with Trips.

Until today, I hadn’t realized how much I’d learned from my mom. I pull out some cleaners and not others for different stains, talking Trips out of using chemicals that’d ruin the original woodwork, barely visible under the grime.

Cleaning lady might not be a glamorous job, but there are practical applications. And apparently, I absorbed enough of them during her endless complaints and gripes about work.

Once the kitchen won’t require hazard pay from the plumber, we move to the downstairs bathroom. It’s a much smaller space, and being this close to Trips makes my skin tingle. “You don’t strike me as someone who had to clean his own room,” I say, not sure how else to fill the charged silence .

“I didn’t. But I figured out pretty quickly in rehab that I like a clean space, and as they’re all about personal responsibility and shit, I had to figure it out.”

Well, that didn’t fix the silence.

“My mom cleans houses,” I say, the only thing I can latch onto.

“Did you ever help her?”

“She brought me a lot when I was a kid over the summer, because we couldn’t afford the camps some of my friends went to. I made beds, swept, vacuumed. Nothing too hard, as I was like, seven. Once I got older, I only went along if she took on more clients than she should. But we usually ended up fighting, so it wasn’t efficient. When I started working over the summer as a babysitter and nanny at thirteen, I wasn’t available to her, so that was that.”

“Is that why you knew exactly where to find the paint at Walgreens?”

“Bored kids on a rainy day are one glitter bomb away from catastrophe.”

He snorts, then leans into the tub, his muscles bunching under his t-shirt as he scrubs decades of grime from the porcelain. And once again, the urge to stop what I’m doing and enjoy the view sparks. Instead, I focus on making the floors not brown and sticky. What the hell did people do in here?

When we move to the upstairs bathroom, it’s obvious it’s much worse than the kitchen and downstairs bathroom combined. “Do you think the floor will hold us both?” I ask .

“It’s going to be a complete teardown up here, but the plumber needs to cap and mark the pipes, so we don’t end up with water damage.”

“Is that mold?” I cover my nose, the pungent smell making my stomach roll.

He sniffs, his nose wrinkling. “Shit. Yeah. Let’s leave this one. If there’s mold, no amount of scrubbing will make this safe.”

“What about the basement?”

“Not a priority. We’ll get the plumber down there after we gut this bathroom.”

I bump against his shoulder. “Is there a calendar for this? A color-coded Gant chart with timelines?”

He glances down at me, and I immediately retreat, remembering we aren’t touching anymore, and instead trail him down the stairs, stepping over the busted one again.

“Yeah. Something like that,” he says as we gather up our stuff, turning the temperature back down.

We only take the ladder back home, the kitchen light now clean enough to show exactly how disgusting everything we haven’t touched is. Money laundering isn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be.

He points at the other house on the block with a sold sign in front of it as we pull out. “That one’s ours too.”

Ours. “Do they have code names?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes. “You’re having too much fun with this.”

“Why wouldn’t I? You have code names for things. Enjoy the absurdity of that, Trips. I’m going to. So?”

“Not yet. ”

“You’ll have to show me where blue is sometime. How about green for the one we just cleaned, because of the mold. Is the other one as bad?”

“No. More holes in the walls, less gross.”

“Black for that one, then, for all the holes.”

He laughs. “Okay, Crash. You share that around. We’re going to run out of colors here at some point.”

“Hopefully we won’t need that many rendezvous points. Or any.”

“Better safe than fucked.”

I squeeze my fingers into my thigh. “How fucked are we right now, Trips?”

“We’ll find out after tomorrow.”

“Am I ready?”

“No one could be ready, Clara. Not for my fucking family.”

“So play sweet little rich girl and hope for the best?”

“Yup.”

“How much of an asshole is rich boy Trips? Do I need to prep for that, too?”

He pulls into the lot behind our house. “Clara, I’ll be the same amount of an asshole as always.”

I nod. “But more like you were when we first met, right? Not like now?”

His lips scrunch up, and he runs his hands through his hair. “Nothing’s changed, Clara. Nothing can change. It’s not safe.” He launches himself from the car, pulling out the ladder and rushing to the door, not once meeting my eyes.

It’s official: tomorrow is going to fucking suck.